Throwaway1234

As I've been daily driving Fedora Silverblue for almost two years now, I always am astonished whenever I hear horror stories from other users that have broken their systems due to seemingly innocent actions. I hope this was just a dud due to the VM environment and isn't representative of KDE Neon's stability; which I've actually heard good things about*.

I'm personally also most fond of picking the independent (so not a derivative) distro that best suits your needs and customize it from there, unless the planned modifications are hard and/or cumbersome to realize and a popular derivative that streamlines most of that already exists.

Thank you Jorge for chiming in!

KDE Neon is indeed an excellent distro if you like KDE Plasma. I would love to read your findings/evaluation on that 😉!

Could be, but I honestly wouldn't know 😅. But thanks for sharing these; perhaps these may provide pointers that would help/enable me to better comprehend it.

I really don’t know. I’ve been using Ubuntu for so damn long now that it’s just comfortable to work with. I know all the dpkg and apt commands by heart and I know where to find everything when I need to really customize my system. Plus they have great support for 3rd party drivers for things like NVidia which is great. But, I’m really wary about the whole telemetry thing and sending package and usage data to Canonical. Plus, they’ve been pushing snaps pretty hard to a point that they sneak snap packages instead of installing the actual deb package when using apt. I don’t like being forced into using things like that without my express consent. So, yeah I’ve been thinking of switching.

Thanks for the excellent elaboration! It's almost sad to see how the great have fallen... And I'd have to agree with most of your thoughts. Ultimately, it's your choice to make. But if I'd have to share my two cents, then I would say:

• Even if you're positive on departing from Ubuntu, you don't have to forsake it for something entirely different; which is where I would put any non-Debian-based distro (which includes EndeavourOS).
• There are a lot of distros that are based on either Debian or Ubuntu which should be able to remind you of the good ol' Ubuntu. Besides Elementary OS and Pop!_OS, there are other popular picks like Linux Mint and Zorin OS. And we haven't even mentioned the likes of KDE Neon, MX Linux, Rhino Linux, SparkyLinux, SpiralLinux, Tuxedo OS, Vanilla OS etc or heck, just plain ol' Debian itself. I think as long as it's Debian/Ubuntu-based and your favourite Desktop Environment is well-supported, then it's at least a distro worth considering.

run on boot is easy if you run containers via systemd, if service is enabled it auto-starts on boot

TIL, thank you for that insight!

if disabled, than you start it manually.

That's the peculiar part; some of the containers I've had since I was on Silverblue, but back then they never autostarted on boot. Just (relatively) recently, since the rebase to Bluefin-dx, have I experienced that all of the containers -so even the ones that existed prior- autostart on boot.

podman does not autostart containers after boot. You have to manually start them, or write a start script. Or create a systemd unit for each of them.

FWIW, I'm on Bluefin-dx (one of uBlue^[1]^'s images) and I've noticed that my containers autostart at boot since I've rebased from Silverblue to Bluefin-dx. Mind you; I'm not necessarily advocating for you to make the switch to Bluefin-dx, but it's at least worth finding out how they've been able to achieve that and perhaps implement their ways for your own benefit.

1. Which are mostly Fedora Atomic images with some QoL and thus SELinux, Podman (etc.) are just baked in as you would expect.

Thank you OP for sharing your evaluations on these distros! Everyone has their own biases, but they can still become valuable whenever more than one item/article is evaluated. Which is exactly what you've done. So kudos to you!

people are asking around about what’s the best distro for a newbie gamer

"newbie gamer" sounds cute. Did you mean newbie to Linux instead? Or perhaps newbie to Linux gaming?

Furthermore, are you also interested into a distro for yourself? Or to recommend to others? Or were you just interested in some of the distros you've been seeing and wanted to try a couple of them out?

I am highly considering using it as a daily driver.

Which would imply that you're at least (somewhat) interested in exploring a different daily driver. Are there any reasons you want to let go of your current daily driver?

Same for me, with the addition of me being a people-pleaser. I already have to select which voice I listen to, since there are hundreds of different ones contradicting each other.

Very commendable! I hope you can remain positive and optimistic. Unfortunately, I've stopped caring much for others' opinions. I hope I'm wrong; but to me most people that engage in these topics somehow lack knowledge, are not very intelligent or just plain ill-informed/ misinformed and obnoxiously oblivious for how wrong they are. This doesn't mean that others' opinions/views are de facto wrong, but I try (as hard as it sometimes is) to assess/evaluate ideas based on their respective merit(s) rather than how often they're voiced or how popular they are.

Fedora Atomic has matured heavily, and I think it is perfectly usable, both in terms of reliability and availability.

Absolutely. I find it hard to recommend other distros, unless something specific is sought after that's either very hard or plain impossible to materialize/accomplish on Fedora Atomic.

It’s just that it is quite different from other distros, especially when you want to install apps. For newcomers, just telling them to go into the software center and selecting the apps to install (via Flatpak) is perfectly enough. It only gets a bit more complicated when they want more and have to turn to the CLI (e.g. Distrobox).

Paradigm shift for sure. Curiously, I'd argue the average Android/iOS-user should be fine with only resorting to the software storefront. So in a sense, non-Windows/Linux users might have it easier on Fedora Atomic 😅. Simply for not having (false) preconceived notions on how something should work/function.

Which one(s)

Unsure if distrohopping the dualboot counts, but if it does, then the following was my path (note that after Fedora Silverblue was installed, it remained on the system; the two distros in between the two Silverblues were dualboots):

Fedora Kinoite -> Fedora Silverblue -> EndeavourOS -> Nobara -> Fedora Silverblue

why?

I started with Fedora Kinoite after spending 1-2 weeks on gathering information on distros. During the research-phase, I learned what distros are, their components, how to analyze the differences between distros, which components are ultimately more beneficial for me and thus slowly but surely the distro that would suit me best started to take shape.

My switch to Linux was on the basis of privacy concerns and Windows 10's mishaps on my laptop were what pulled the trigger, which in retrospect were probably caused by hardware faults. Regardless, as privacy was my main concern, security became paramount; as there's no privacy as long as access to your data is not secured off. Therefore Qubes OS, while not necessarily a Linux distro, would have been my first choice. But, unfortunately, my system wasn't capable of running it.

Therefore, I had to settle with something else. As my endgame is Qubes OS, I wasn't very interested in getting into the nitty gritty of Linux for the virtue of hardening it. Instead, I opted to rely on a distro that would do the heavy lifting for me. Such a distro wouldn't only have to be known for taking security very seriously, they also required an excellent track record. As such, I landed on Fedora, Kicksecure and openSUSE. Other projects that are known to take security seriously like Whonix and Tails aren't suited for general use. Furthermore, they're ideally used in conjunction with another system; Whonix as a VM and Tails accessed on a USB-stick whenever you require an amnesic operating system.

Choosing between Fedora, Kicksecure and openSUSE was hard based on these criteria only. The third and final criteria to seal the deal was atomicity. Like I mentioned earlier, my laptop had issues; it could randomly turn off. So I needed a robust system that could handle such disturbances and not die in the process. This is where the aforementioned atomicity comes into play, this ensures that the system either updates or not; no in-between messed up state due to a power outage or whatsoever. At the time, only Fedora had a somewhat mature system capable of atomic upgrades; namely Kinoite and Silverblue. The differences between these two were about their respective desktop environments. I hadn't experienced either of the two previously, but went initially for Kinoite for how KDE Plasma reminded me more of what I was already used to (i.e. Windows).

Fedora Kinoite came with its sets of troubles. It was still a relatively young project; it was the first release in which it was officially supported. As I knew how easy Fedora's Atomic distros made switching from one base to another, I just rebased to Fedora Silverblue with the rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/35/x86_64/silverblue command and went on with my life 😜.

After this came the honeymoon-phase and I was really positively surprised by how well everything was going. From all the things I had done for the sake of privacy, switching to Linux was (and still is) my favorite. But as I was ever expanding my Linux workflow to include everything I did on Windows, I happened to reach a (seemingly) insurmountable obstacle; Davinci Resolve. No matter what I did on Fedora Silverblue, it was always functioning less performant compared to Windows; which in retrospect seems to be related to the fact that Davinci Resolve requires a dedicated GPU on Linux (though some workarounds do exist). In hopes of resolving this issue, I tried to install Arch as a dualboot. As this was pre archinstall, this was a miserable experience. And after a few tries, I still wasn't content with what I got and instead opted to install EndeavourOS.

EndeavourOS was pretty cool. I already liked what I saw from Arch within Distrobox and EndeavourOS was able to deliver an excellent experience (at least initially). Davinci Resolve worked better here than it did in Fedora Silverblue. And it was overall a pretty snappy experience, so I returned to it occasionally for other things (like gaming) as well. Until..., one day..., it just stopped working 🤣. Perhaps I could have done a better job by installing Snapper/Timeshift, but I didn't and didn't care enough for it to reinstall...

Of course, the departure of EndeavourOS did leave behind a void, so eventually I tried Nobara as I believed it might be capable to provide a similar experience. And I did like it, though not to the degree of EndeavourOS. Eventually this one also passed out 🤣.

Currently, I've just dismissed the idea to run Davinci Resolve on Linux and I'm more happy ever since 😜. For better performance during gaming, I've since been resorting to bazzite-arch and Conty. While performance shouldn't be as good as native CachyOS or other highly optimized gaming distributions, it's more than fine as is and the sub 5% performance/fps I'm missing out on is not worth for how much more convenient my current setup is.

FWIW, I do see myself utilizing Gentoo and NixOS in their designated qubes whenever the switch to Qubes OS occurs. But until then, I'm making the best out of Fedora Silverblue.

Thank you for your elaborate reply 😜!

The guide is mainly meant for exact this kind of new users, who are perfectly fine with either Fedora or Mint. I excluded edge-cases, like QubesOS, completely on purpose, as this should be consisting of only 2 (or so) distros with different DEs. This should make 80% of exactly those post redundant. If someone wants a “non-normal” distro, they can still of course feel free to ask.

I agree that it makes sense to start with tackling the problem in a way compliant with the 80/20 rule; i.e. 20 percent of the work to deal with 80 percent of the cases. I'm perhaps too much of a (wannabe) perfectionist/tryhard, which is why the process described in my previous post was a lot more involved and (perhaps) therefore more utopian/idealist than realistic. Perhaps I've even alluded to this a couple of times 😅.

I thought about using Sozi as a tool to achieve that. I have to research tho how to make a website first. My idea was to keep the exact structure of the chart, but when you zoom in a lot to the distro, you get the description.

Great idea! FWIW, perhaps an interactive map with pop-ups may be utilized to that effect. Though, there's plenty to consider here and a lot of ways to do it justice. I trust in your capabilities to achieve that splendidly.

I see VanillaOS as a great competitor to Mint, especially for people who want something of a managed and simple experience, while also being capable to do normal PC stuff. I see VOS 2 as “stable” enough in just a few weeks, there’s mainly only some polishing and fixing in newer under-the-hood stuff, but the surface-stuff is already fine.

I haven't installed the beta of its Orchid release yet. So, hopefully my gut feeling is just wrong. Ironically, the first time I installed a relatively immature version of an atomic distro (Fedora Kinoite, but like its first release (so Fedora 35 at the time)), it was a very bad experience and I rebased right away to Silverblue and haven't look back since 🤣. Hopefully others will not be stung by VOS 2, like how I was stung by Kinoite.

It’s mainly about preference, if one likes a simple UI or prefers traditional workflows. How can I make that more clear?

By not naming any of the associated operating systems, but instead opt to distill their respective workflows in plain text. I'm very aware that this is pretty hard without spending way too many words on their descriptions. Therefore, perhaps it's worth exploring if the 'intended workflows' of the different DEs might be (screen) captured and displayed as gifs. Obviously with the caveat that the 'intended' isn't forced upon them and that they're free to change them to better suit their needs.